Some books don’t so much unfold as unravel—like a tangled thread tugged gently through grief, memory, and love until what’s left is soft, frayed, and quietly shimmering. That’s how And Then the Gray Heaven felt to me: not plot-driven, but mood-bound, elliptical, and achingly tender. At its heart is Jules, a sharp, dissociative narrator grieving the loss of their beloved partner B, whose death in a freak accident cracks open the bureaucratic cruelty and emotional fragility of queer mourning under capitalism.

Jules is a beautifully unsteady voice—cynical yet earnest, shaped by Florida’s humid neglect, foster care trauma, and the long shadow of childhood dissociation. Their grief doesn’t look like clean stages but like swimming in murky water: sometimes soothing, sometimes drowning. Katz’s prose mirrors this emotional ebb and flow, moving between cutting observational humor and surreal beauty. The writing is lyrical without feeling indulgent, fragmented without losing clarity, and always reaching toward something—someone—just out of reach.

This is a novel about queer love as resistance, about what it means to remember and be remembered when systems would rather forget you. It reframes burial not as an end but a beginning—an act of love and reclamation. Jules’s road trip with Theo to return B’s ashes to museums becomes a queer odyssey, a gesture of devotion against the erasure that often haunts trans and nonbinary death. Through it all, art becomes a thread of continuity and protest, a way to insist: we were here.

While the plot sometimes drifted and didn’t always stick with me, the language did—glittering, splintered, and full of ache. And Then the Gray Heaven may not leave you with clear answers, but it will leave you with a feeling: of something quietly sacred breaking open and blooming in the wreckage.

📖 Read this if you love: tender meditations on queer grief, poetic character-driven narratives, stories that center chosen family and the politics of memory, or the works of Ocean Vuong.

🔑 Key Themes: Queer Grief and Love, Chosen Family and Care Networks, The Bureaucratization of Death, Memory and Artistic Legacy, Trans Erasure and Reclamation.